Today I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Soph Mort who is seriously just the coolest. Dr. Soph is a Clinical Psychologist, life coach and yoga teacher. And basically her aim is to make psychology more accessible to people outside of just the therapy room (um yassss!). She believes that most of us haven’t been raised in a way that empowers us to understand ourselves. This means that most of us live in a world where we feel like we can’t ever relax, where we can never just BE. And as a result our world becomes saturated with a looming sense of failure, and a fear of our own emotional experiences. She wants to help people re-learn about their own experience and affirms them in recognizing that their emotions are normal.

THIS EPISODE IS GREAT FOR ANYONE WHO:

Struggles with allowing themselves to actually feel their emotions

Is curious to learn ways to self-soothe when you feel triggered

Wants to learn how to quiet their inner critic

Is tired of feeling like they aren’t enough

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

The fear many of us have in feeling/experiencing our emotions

The pandemic of this feeling of failure and falling short of perfection

The persona (armor) we show to the world because we are terrified of actually being seen

The type of person who is worthy of love, affection, praise and belonging and how this is modeled for us in media (ads, movies, social media, celebrities etc.)

We are not shown people who struggle, who fail, who get it wrong – instead we are shown status, appearance focused, perfectly lit, people whose life appears easy, rich, and happy.

“From a very young age we learn that the people who deserve love, look and act like the people in the films and in the movies, the ones who have everything, the ones who are perfect”

The detrimental effects of marketing and how they play upon our vulnerability

“Self-care and self-love is an act of rebellion

Emotions are essential to survival – they act as a message that let us know our brain has detected something in our environment that it either wants to turn towards or away from

“All emotions are equal. All emotions are useful. Even the ones that don’t feel so good…aren’t dangerous…they’re just messages”

What our brain interprets as threats and rewards is NOW based on our belief system (where in the PAST our interpretation of threat and reward was based on survival: crops good, saber tooth tiger bad)

Societal expectations of people who identify as women

The importance of both talk therapy and movement therapy when healing from trauma

The profound role yoga had in her life in her own path to recovery

The oppressions and privileges that come with the different genders

To cope with perfectionism we often develop a very strong inner critic to “keep us in line”